In the era of globalization and “liquid society”, the issue of constructing national identity with emotion is becoming increasingly prominent. Based on existing studies on both national identity and community, an emotional perspective is refined to analyze the question concerning media construction of an “emotional community”. On the basis of 12,188 reports from the websites of Chinese Mainland official media involving Chinese overseas students from 2015 to 2020, this paper uses text analysis along with discourse analysis to study concrete emotional expressions of national identity in those reports and analyzes how official media build an imagined “emotional community”. This study shows how “motherland” is molded by media to occupy the central place in an orderly action network that houses a complicated emotional network wherein there mainly exists love, especially in the form of patriotism, and this love is supplemented with other emotions such as disgust, fear, and anger while the state is being rendered as a powerful agent. These emotions and networks have played vital roles for the cohesion of China. In the narrations by media about crimes involving Chinese overseas students, regardless whether they are criminals or victims: disgust is invariably revealed in negative discourse which strengthens the boundary between self and the other; fear is relieved by strategic and poetic discourse which greatly shortens the mental distance between the country and its overseas students; love and national pride can be used to promote group cohesion; the text containing traumatic memory compresses time and space to construct the “We” identity; discourse of righteous indignation inspires Chinese nationals to unite together and take action. In the media reports inspiring Chinese overseas students to stand up and fight for their legitimate rights, emotions function as the criteria for moral judgment and values. Then in the process of appreciating and depreciating different emotions, the media are imagining a kind of “sentimental citizen” with the ability to reason, living in an imagined emotional community and making contributions to the formation of the community as well.